Imagine it’s 1830, in the Mid-Atlantic of the United States. You are building a house. And you need to lay a floor.

You could install plywood…but that won’t be invented until 1865. You could order boards from your local lumber yard…but those aren’t in widespread existence yet, and standardization of lumber products won’t occur until the 1920’s. If you’re lucky, you might have a sawmill nearby… a fairly rare thing in agrarian and frontier communities…

Let’s assume you can score some boards from a local mill, or there’s an old barn you can take the boards out of, or in a pinch you could hand-mill some boards right at your job site. Chances are they won’t all match in terms of wood species, or quality, or width or length or thickness. So you just gather together whatever you can.

The next thing you might do is improve your boards with tongue-and-groove edging so they hold together better. But you don’t own a router, so you’ll have to hand-cut those edges yourself. And no matter how good a carpenter you are, there will be variations.

Which means that when you lay that floor down and nail it into place, it’s…meh. There are different colors. There are gaps. There are knot holes. There are loose spots. And you don’t have wood putty, or an orbital sander to grind everything smooth.

Hang on! You can cover it all over with carpeting. Heck, they’ve been weaving carpet in Philadelphia for, like, a decade or two. Unfortunately, the price of that is pretty cost-prohibitive. And as for a fine area rug? That’s definitely not in most folks’ price range, unless they are lucky enough to have inherited one from a rich uncle.

What you CAN do is paint it. Just go down to the Sherwin-Williams store and…wait 36 years for them to invent canned paint. Or you could make some up yourself: mix up a combination of milk, linseed oil, and a little tar. As for color, you’ve got only two basic color palettes to choose from. You can make red by mixing in some iron oxide (rust), which yields a range of colors from brown to bloody. Or you can make much more expensive blue tones by mixing in patinaed copper, yielding colors like turquoise, or the famous Prussian blue which George Washington used at Mount Vernon.

Rust is lot easier to get than copper – have you seen many old barns painted blue? – so you go for red. And if you’re lucky, your red turns out to be a nice bold color.

Congratulations, you’ve laid a pretty nice red floor. And if you time-travel from 1830 to 2019, you find it has held up pretty well. As part of a post-fire renovation, your floor has been re-exposed, after lying hidden under wall-to-wall carpeting and plywood for…a very long time. It looks pretty darn good.

(Yep, we found an old red floor as we were renovating the Asa Hunt House. Truth be told, it’s unlikely the floor is original to our house; it’s probably a reproduction from the 20^th century. But since fine unpainted wood floors – so common today – are a product of the Industrial Revolution, we think we’re gonna keep it and be historically accurate-ish. We may cheat by repairing and sanding it first, but it’ll get a coat of red paint, and be as good as 1830.)